I’m going to answer both – starting with BlackBerry 10. The short answer is no – there will be no Theme Studio product for BlackBerry 10 and there will be no theme support in the BlackBerry 10 OS. We’ve worked diligently over the last year and a half with our design team to create a new user interface – focused around the idea of “flow”. While there are some great themes built for the current BlackBerry OS, BlackBerry 10 is designed to provide users a unique experience that can be personalized in other ways, but will have a consistent look and feel in iconography and settings.

Our resources are focused on delivering a best in the industry developer experience and an astonishing end user experience. We’ve been wrestling with this decision for a while – but based on multiple factors, we’ve made the decision to not release Theme Studio 7. Once we looked at the final product, it was clear to us that it didn’t address theme developer needs or asks. In addition, feedback from our Theme Studio beta testers showed us that the quality of the tooling would not be acceptable.

Many theme developers have been using Theme Studio 6 to create themes for BlackBerry OS 7 and 7.1 devices. We even documented the process in a two-part series here on the blog. We encourage you to continue to explore the opportunities of BlackBerry 7 as our subscriber base has grown to 80 million globally.

What’s the silver lining? One word – Cascades. The work that you, our theme developers, have done in Theme Studio shows how amazing your creative talents are. We encourage you to unleash that creativity on BlackBerry 10 using Cascades to create stunning UI animations in apps. We have a number of resources on Cascades that can help you, and we encourage you to reach out for support from our dev relations team in our forums, on Twitter®, and at our events.

Most recently, here are sessions available from BlackBerry Jam Americas:

JAM65 – BlackBerry 10 Visual Style
JAM07 – Extreme Agile UX with Cascades
JAM09 – Fundamentals of the Cascades UI Framework
JAM04 – UI/UX: Finding your Flow

In addition, we have number of samples, help blogs, and webinars on Cascades, and we encourage you to look at the opportunities BlackBerry 10 app development offers. This includes our Built for BlackBerry and 10k Guarantee program.

This was not an easy decision to make and we know this isn’t easy for theme developers to hear, but we appreciate everything you’ve done – and are continuing to do – for the BlackBerry ecosystem. We hope you’ll join us in our new chapter as we’re committed to providing the most compelling mobile computing experience with the commercial launch of BlackBerry 10.

I recently had the pleasure of chatting with Derek Konigsberg, who some of you may know better as @dkonigs.  For those of you who may not know Derek, he’s been developing apps for the BlackBerry® platform since 2006 (starting with BlackBerry handheld software version 4.1), so he’s seen quite the overhaul to the platform.  Long story short, my conversation with Derek about his questions on BlackBerry® 10 development inspired a really neat idea: Stump the BlackBerry Devs.

How do I stump someone and who am I stumping?  Provide us with a design or mock-up that you think would be difficult to be implemented using our Cascades™ UI framework. The Cascades tools development team will try to implement your submission in a flexible manner that involves no hardcoding of values and that is flexible enough to handle multiple screen resolutions and multiple form factors.

Here are the details:

Mock up a design for a screen, making it as beautiful or as ugly as you like.

• It doesn’t matter how you create it – use a professional design tool or draw it on a napkin.
• Don’t worry about a data source, we’ll be using dummy data anyway.

Throughout the month of August, submit an image of your mock-up to the @BlackBerryDev Twitter® account using the hashtag #StumpTheBlackBerryDevs.

• Final day for submissions will be August 31, 2012.
• If an image isn’t worth a thousand words and you feel the need to describe your design with more than the 140 characters of Twitter will allow, feel free to submit multiple tweets to explain your design.

We’ll choose three of the most difficult or creative submissions and throughout the month of September, and then we’ll get to work implementing them using the R8 SDK beta release that Tim Neil talked about here.

At BlackBerry Jam Americas, we’ll host a session during the Unconference Day where we’ll reveal the chosen designs, explain how we implemented them, and walk you through the reasoning behind the approach taken. For any features of the design which could not be elegantly implemented, we’ll do a few things:

1. Implement the solution per the design using hardcoded values.
2. Provide an alternative solution that is consistent with Cascades design principles.
3. Explain the design decisions behind Cascades for why the solution could not be delivered per what you’d submitted.
4. If applicable, add new features to the roadmap which would allow this design to be implemented in future and publicly share the tracking of those features via the BlackBerry Developer Issue Tracker.

In parallel to the activities at BlackBerry Jam Americas, we’ll also post the code for the solutions to our open source repo at blackberry.github.com and will share a detailed walkthrough of the solution to this blog.

Sound like a fun challenge?  I hope so.  Now let’s see what you’re made of…can you stump the Cascades R&D team?

For developers that are new to Cascades development, it might be worthwhile to give a brief explanation of what Cascades Builder and Cascades Exporter are. Cascades Builder is an extension to the Eclipse based Momentics™ IDE, providing developers with tooling features for developing Cascades applications for BlackBerry® 10. Our goal is to provide powerful source editing features like code completion, WYSIWYG style visual editing, and UI debugging and profiling functionality.

Cascades Exporter is an extension to Adobe® Photoshop® that automatically cuts up the layers and crops them snugly. The images and their layout positions are saved as a bundle that can be imported to Cascades Builder and converted to QML.

In my previous blog post I wrote about the features that we had in place for the first beta release, and the direction we are heading.

Improvements

Below you can read about the improvements we have made to the different feature areas in our second beta release.

Design view

As we have seen from your feedback, the design view is the one feature that stands out. But although it is a great feature, it has not been perfected. For example, a user study showed that it is not obvious how to switch on the preview. The tiny icons for switching between code and preview were apparently not self-explanatory enough.

Another tiny icon that did not do its job was the “error cue” — the green/red square in the top-right corner of the design view, which should indicate rendering problems due to errors in the QML. But even if you understood its purpose, it was easy to miss when it switched from green to red and virtually impossible for those with a color vision deficiency.

Now we have replaced the green/red square with an error indication that should be impossible not to see. A new icon clearly signals that the rendering is broken, together with an error message that explains the type of problem.

Another neat improvement to the design view is the “fit to window” zoom level, instead of only being able to select one of the predefined zoom levels like 100 or 50 percent. Please refer to the following Knowledge Base article for details on some known issues which will be addressed in an upcoming patch.

Edit actions in outline view

In the previous release, the outline view was purely “read only”. But even without the possibility to edit or rearrange the UI nodes within the outline view, it did serve a purpose. The tree of UI nodes that you can fold/unfold offered a convenient way to get an overview of the UI implementation, which quite quickly can become large and complex.

Certain tasks are easiest done by typing code; others by using your mouse. With the outline view improvements in this release, we take yet another step towards being a visual design tool. Using your mouse, you can now drag a component from the components palette into the UI tree in the outline view. You can also use the mouse to rearrange and remove objects.

New project templates

The purpose of the project templates is to set up the necessary project structure and to provide boilerplate code to kick start your application development. The first beta release only had two project templates. And considering that one of them was called “Empty project”, there was not really much to choose between.

With this release there are eight different and well-commented project templates. They all have quite different purposes, with different UI scenarios (and UI controls) in mind. All of them based on common BlackBerry 10 UI patterns, using a variation of Cascades core UI controls.

QML source editing improvements

As I wrote in my previous blog post, really solid source editing is what we believe is application developers’ – and hence our – top priority. This is something that (not surprisingly) was confirmed by a survey we conducted after the first beta release. Especially improved QML code assist (or “code completion”) was a commonly asked-for feature. This is something that we have been and will continue to be working on. The source editing improvements in this release, however, are in the area of QML validation. The previous release had validation of QML syntax. You would see an error if you did not type a colon after having typed a property. But there was no validation logic that checked that the property actually exists and is valid.

With this release, we have a certain amount of semantic QML validation in place. In addition to checking that the form of your code is correct, we also check that the code is semantically valid. For example, making sure that the properties you are trying to use actually exist:

More specifically, unknown properties and signals are now marked as an error. An error is also shown for read-only properties, when there are duplicate properties and for invalid format of the ‘id’ property. Warnings are displayed for id properties with quotes. Since we do not yet check for user defined QML components, we mark unknown components as info and not as error.

Another source editing improvement, albeit small compared to the improved validation, is color settings for syntax highlighting. Now you can customize the color of your QML code, with color options for keywords, comments, errors, etc.

Cascades Exporter

It is inspiring to see the Cascades Exporter being picked up. Since Cascades Exporter is a plugin to Adobe Photoshop and targets designers, the adoption is obviously not as widespread for developers as Cascades Builder. But for the people using Cascades Exporter, it seems to do its job well. On a scale between one and ten on how useful the features of Cascades Exporter were, approximately 50 percent of the survey respondents gave it a ten.

Performance improvements

A quite significant flaw in the previous release was that switching between layers became slow for Photoshop documents with a hundred or so layers. The lag was even a whole second for documents with a thousand layers. With the performance improvements in this new release this action is instant, even for very large documents.

As a side effect to fixing the layer switching lag, the export action has now become faster. The bigger the document, the more noticeable the difference, with a performance increase of roughly 20 percent for a large document.

UI controls palette

The resulting artifacts when exporting Photoshop design previously were essentially bitmaps and text objects. We have continued with the notion of UI controls in the Photoshop design and introduced a UI controls palette. A subset of the BlackBerry 10 controls are available in the palette and can be used in the design.

When performing the export action, these are preserved as actual controls, as opposed to being exported as bitmaps. So when importing the design into Cascades Builder, a Button in the Photoshop document will become a Button control in the QML file in Cascades Builder.

The near future

There is unfortunately a certain amount of tabbing wackiness left in this release. But this is being worked on, and will see the light together with other improvements in the next release.

Among the improvements that we have in the works is QML components aware validation and code assist. If, for example, you have a WarpDrive.qml, when invoking the code assist it will include WarpDrive among the proposals.

There will also be support for comment toggling, code indentation, and the formatting will be much better when dragging a control from the palette into the source editor. We’d love to hear what you think – let us know in the comments.

Fluxible is a new conference this September that brings user experience and design experts from around the world together for two days of workshops and talks. The team at Research In Motion® (RIM®) is especially excited that our own Dan Gärdenfors (Senior Concept Designer of The Astonishing Tribe) has just been announced as closing keynote speaker.

While I was making my way back from the BlackBerry® 10 Jam World Tour and @StartupFest in Montreal, I had the chance to speak with Mark Connolly, one of the organizers of Fluxible, about the origin of the conference, who should attend, and what the event means to the region of Waterloo.

Thanks for taking time to talk with us. Who should register for the conference?

Fluxible was conceived for UX practitioners and researchers – but it’s also a great opportunity for developers, product managers, and others who want to learn about designing front end interfaces and experiences.

I took a look at the agenda and you’re definitely taking advantage of the event spaces here in town.

Yes, we’ve had great support from Communitech. We’re starting at the Conrad Centre for the Performing Arts, which is where the main talks will be. We then move to Kitchener City Hall for a Saturday evening party, and then finish at the Communitech Hub on Sunday with the workshops. It’s very exciting.

What does Fluxible mean to the Waterloo region?

As you likely know, design has become crucial to the success of products and companies in the last several years, and the Waterloo Region has developed the same focus on design that has been visible globally. Bob (Bob Barlow-Busch) and I, as long time champions of uxWaterloo Communtech Peer 2 Peer (P2P), have seen this increased interest and awareness firsthand. To us, the awareness is another sign of the maturation of the region’s transformation into a digital economy. Fluxible is not only an opportunity to show what’s happening in Waterloo Region to the larger UX world, but also to bring the larger UX world to Waterloo Region. In addition to Dan as a keynote speaker, we have an amazing lineup of speakers who will be delivering terrific talks and workshops. Do check them out.

Definitely sounds like it’s going to be a great event.

We think so too! This is the first event of its kind in the area, and we’re really looking forward to attendees coming in from the region, the province, and around the world. It’s an opportunity to network and have a great time.

Early bird registration is open now and available until July 31. For information, check out the Fluxible site. The Fluxible conference takes place on September 22nd and 23rd, 2012.

Nothing is more frustrating than putting countless hours of hard work into your BlackBerry® app, making sure every subroutine is perfect and every millisecond of performance squeezed, only to find out that users are displeased with some aspect of layout or interaction. Speaking from experience, I find that numerous times we all too often dive into architecting and developing the meat and potatoes of an app, leaving the user interface to get created ad hoc. Yet behind every good app there is a great user interface!

Now, you might be saying: “But Matt! I do think about layout and design – but I can’t design for every user’s tastes.” While we do typically put some thought into layout and design, I find we (as developers) rarely think about it from an end user’s perspective. We are too close to the project, and end up seeing aspects of the application from a specific view. Think of it this way – every parent thinks their baby is the cutest ever…but what do the rest of us think? What a good app developer/designer needs to do is take a step back and look at the design from others’ points of view and, better yet, gather points of view from others.

Nothing helps guide a design better than real world feedback. Take your design and layouts and talk to your peers, your mother, your granddad, or even your future end users (basically anyone that will talk to you.) You can even solicit feedback from a limited beta of your app or use various online solutions such as getsatisfaction.com. Ask your users what they like, what they don’t like, how they would expect things to flow, and so on. Taking this feedback and integrating it into your app will help ensure users are happy – and happy users mean good BlackBerry App World™ storefront ratings!

If you cannot easily gather end user feedback on the design and flow of your app, here are some other points to keep in mind at the beginning of your project:

• Keep the user interface and design as simple as possible. Your app should require a user to have little to no instructions in order to get started.
• For touch screen devices, ensure proper spacing of objects that a user will interact with. Nothing will frustrate your users more if their touch events are misread.
• The layout of the screen should be well used, but not too cluttered. For objects in groups, space them evenly for a clean look.
• Make use of menus when required. Menus are great when there are additional options or settings that you want a user to have access to, but don’t want to have them always displayed on screen.
• Lastly, remember to keep your app consistent. Every screen within the app should offer a similar user experience in layout, theme and flow. A user should know this is your app regardless of the screen they are looking at.

Hopefully you have found these tips useful. If you have your own, please share them in the comments section below or head on over to the BlackBerry Developer Support forums and post them there.

Building on the momentum of our extremely successful Web Development and Toolkits webinar , we will be hosting our second ever developer webinar on Tuesday, October 20th, addressing mobile design considerations for application development. Read on for a more detailed overview of this live and free webinar.

Presenter: Sarim Aziz, Senior Application Development Consultant, Developer Relations
Panelists: Mike Kirkup, Director, Developer Relations
Date: Tuesday October 20, 2009.
Time: 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm EST.

Overview:
Join us in an online discussion for BlackBerry Java developers which will help you better understand mobile application design considerations through a review of best practices and real world examples.

We’ll help you address design considerations specific to mobile applications, from Network Communication and User Interface, to Data and Memory management. We’ll also take a look at how you can leverage the BlackBerry Java Development Tools for debugging and optimizing your BlackBerry applications.

After the information presentation, developers will have an opportunity to interact with BlackBerry experts in a real time Q&A session. What are you waiting for? Click on the link below for registration information!

BlackBerry Developer Webinar: BlackBerry Java Development Tools